“From the beginning, philosophers and other students of language, including Plato and Aristotle, have pointed to the immense force that oratorical rhetoric can exert either for good or evil, depending on who is in charge of it. In the metonymic period it was assumed that “good” rhetoric was, as Aristotle put it, the antistrophos or answering chorus of dialectic, as in the sermon that expounded true doctrine or the courtroom defense that was on the side of justice…..

In our day the appearance of oratorical rhetoric in a genuine form seems to be confined to very exceptional circumstances of social crisis, as in the Gettyburg Address of Lincoln or the 1940 speeches of Churchill. For the most part oratorical figures in our day are a feature of advertising and propaganda. Third phase writing, we said, is centrally concerned with distinguishing reality from illusion; advertising and propaganca are designed deliberately to create an illusion, hence they constitute a kind of anti-language, especially in the speeches by so-called charismatic leaders that set up a form of mass hypnosis. When such oratory pretends to be, or thinks it is, rational, it adopts a highly characteristic shuffle derived from a desire to reach certain conclusions in advance, whatever the evidence suggests. There is a good deal of this kind of anti-language in religious writing also, where it takes the tone that Hegel call edifying, emotional resonance without content.”

from “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature” Northrop Frye

Some of Obama’s ‘speeches’ sure fit the propaganda, advertising, anti-language bill in my mind.